accounts, by about a 2:1 ratio.62
Although sexual transgression may be most prominent in this account, the Torah is also championed: by the dead who would still abide by its rules and by the implementation of its statutes even when lack of evidence, let alone judicial autonomy, prevented ordained penalties from being carried out. The Torah called for the choking of the adulterer, and choke he did. Thus the dead man continued to live; he was punished; he made claims of, and was dependent upon, the living; and his sins, manner of death, and ongoing participation in learned dialectical modes of argumentation reestablished core values of the religious tradition and its overall cogency.
The Luria Cases
Although already in Safed, neither Luria nor Vital participated in the exorcism documented by Falcon. They did, however, participate in other exorcisms in 1571, including one or two involving a possessed woman,63 and another involving a possessed young man.64 The reports of these cases became standard inclusions in seventeenth-century hagiographic works dedicated to Luria and his circle. R. Naftali Bacharach even went so far as to relate the case of the possessed widow of Safed twice in his 1648 work, ‘Emek ha-Melekh.65 The other oft-published case involving a woman is so similar to the account involving the widow that it is likely a reworking of the same material. The two cases were not printed alongside one another until 1720, when a collector of these accounts, Shlomo Gabbai of Constantinople, failed to note their essential similarity. In addition to these widely circulated accounts, Vital’s “private” diary, Sefer ha-Ḥezyonot, provides some external corroboration of this case.66 Indeed, although the report of the possession of the widow is presented by an anonymous narrator, the other reports purport to be first-person accounts authored by Vital himself.
The possession of the young nephew of R. Yehoshua Bin Nun is preserved in two distinct forms, one reported by an anonymous narrator, the other ostensibly reported by Vital. The two versions have much in common: a young man, suffering for years from a recurring illness, is diagnosed by Luria as possessed. In each, the spirit speaks at Luria’s command, and explains that he has possessed the nephew to avenge the wrong committed against him by the young man in a previous incarnation. In that previous life, the spirit had been a pauper in Rome; the young man, a charity warden. The refusal of the latter to provide the pauper with adequate support ended tragically, with the pauper’s death. The possession of Bin Nun’s nephew, then, is the pauper’s revenge. Yet Luria prevails upon the spirit to abandon his quest for vengeance and decrees that he leave the young man voluntarily. The spirit agrees, but on one condition: that the young man have no contact with women for a full week. While recognizing the difficulty of these terms, Luria accepts them. At this point, the spirit departs, and Luria establishes a watch over the boy. According to both accounts, the young man is left alone mistakenly in the course of the watch; during that time, his aunt arrives to celebrate his recovery. Finding the young man, she kisses him with joy. At that moment the spirit returns and chokes the lad to death. Having been associated with the episode, Luria quickly departs from Safed to escape punishment from the Turkish authorities in connection with the young man’s demise. According to the accounts, Luria’s speedy departure was accomplished through a magical path-jumping technique known as kefiẓat ha-derekh.67
The Bin Nun account focuses upon the dramatic consequences of sin, exemplifying the indefatigable relentlessness of what we might call transmigrational lex talionis. Despite being blessed with magical gifts and extraordinary powers, even Luria is ultimately unable to rescue the poor young man from his deceased avenger. It may be no accident that this account is the only one in which Luria plays the active role of exorcist; in other cases, he provided others with the requisite instruction to expel unwelcome spirits. Despite Luria’s magical prowess, his effectiveness in this domain was limited, even he would assert, by his metaphysical nature, by his fundamentally gentle “soul-root.” As we will see below, an accomplished exorcist was thought to require the severity borne of more stern metaphysical sources. Moreover, the victim’s death could not be strictly attributed to Luria’s failure. This account preserves a depiction of the great master that does not detract from his awesome reputation. Luria’s account is more hagiographic than the possession accounts of Ḥallewa and Falcon: Luria manages in the course of this account to successfully diagnose the possession by means of his clairvoyant powers, to adjure the spirit to depart voluntarily without resorting to complex magical techniques, and to escape the authorities after the victim’s death by performing the famous path-jumping technique that spirits him from Safed to Tiberias “in one second.”
Although Luria’s role and its depiction in the Bin Nun account are fascinating, so too is the profile of the victim. The young eighteen-year-old is characterized as having suffered from chronic heart pain for a dozen years before Luria’s intervention and diagnosis. The victim is asked to cooperate in the exorcism process, an expectation that we have seen neither in the first early modern accounts nor in the classic tales of possession from antiquity. His full participation seems to bespeak the new level of involvement of the victim in the phenomenon, now reconceived as a transmigrational interaction in which possessor and possessed may be conceived as having been historically, even “karmically,” linked to one another. As in the account of the “Young Man in Safed” above, here again we have a male-in-male possession scenario. And although less sexually dramatic than the Falcon account, the Bin Nun account does have an obviously suggestive homosexual dimension. In this case, a psychodynamic reading of the story would note not only the male-in-male construction of the possession episode, but no less the terms of the spirit for a successful exorcism: the absolute isolation of the young man from women for a brief, albeit unreasonably difficult, length of time.
With the lengthy account of the possession of the widow of Safed, we return to a case of Falcon-like proportions. Unlike the Falcon report, however, this account opens without any didactic introduction.68 We are confronted immediately by the penetration of the spirit into a poor widow, which has caused her great suffering. Her suffering notwithstanding, however, we are told that the immediate consequence of this affliction was her transformation into a public attraction in Safed. Visited by many people, the widow answers their questions and reveals their innermost troubles and desires. In two of the three versions of this account, the scene is portrayed in terms that normalize her newfound clairvoyant powers and relationship to her community.69 These sympathetic versions reveal the spirit to be that of a learned rabbinic student, thus ratifying the integrity of the woman’s revelations, and lend support to the arguments in favor of regarding spirit possession as a potentially positive form of womens’ religiosity, arguments that will be developed below. In the version preserved in Sambari, however, the problematic nature of the possession episode never abates: the visitors do not cease to implore the spirit to leave the poor widow in peace so that she might support herself and her children. And the spirit’s clairvoyance is devoted to exposing the visitor’s sins, to their public embarrassment. When a sage finally visits the woman, the spirit indeed declares himself to be this rabbi’s former student, yet the spirit admits that he was often rebuked for his foul behavior.70 In a sense, we can detect equivocation on the narrative level no less than in the reception history of this account. The scenario, by all accounts, is both thrilling and terrorizing, with large crowds gathering to behold a widow with newfound clairvoyant powers. Borne of her “impregnation” by the spirit of a rabbinic student, her impressive powers can also be directed against these voyeurs who have gathered around her in her hour of misery, revealing their sins. And even the character of a rabbinic student-spirit seems to suggest something right that has gone awry.
Finally, according to all accounts, the woman’s sufferings become so unbearable that her family seeks out the services of R. Isaac Luria, whom they hope will exorcise the spirit. Unable or unwilling to attend to the matter personally, Luria sends Vital to the woman after empowering him through the laying of hands, and furnishing him with mystical intentions and threats that were capable of evicting the spirit against its will.71 Thus prepared, Vital makes his way to the widow’s house. Vital never forgot this first meeting with the woman, and included a description of the encounter in his diary decades later. This private journal entry
